Lagrangian displacement field estimators in cosmology

TL;DR

This paper develops new estimators for the nonlinear displacement field in cosmology, demonstrating that previous methods cannot fully reconstruct the true displacement, but improvements are achieved through an effective field theory approach.

Contribution

The paper introduces two new displacement estimators and enhances the theoretical model for better reconstruction accuracy in cosmological data analysis.

Findings

New estimators reduce numerical artifacts in displacement reconstruction.

The improved model achieves reconstruction accuracy within a few percent at relevant scales.

Previous methods cannot fully recover the nonlinear displacement field shape.

Abstract

The late-time nonlinear Lagrangian displacement field is highly correlated with the initial field, so reconstructing it could enable us to extract primordial cosmological information. Our previous work [1] carefully studied the displacement field reconstructed from the late time density field using the iterative method proposed by Ref. [2] and found that it does not fully converge to the true, underlying displacement field (e.g., $\sim 8\%$ offset at $k\sim 0.2 \ihMpc$ at $z=0.6$). We also constructed the Lagrangian perturbation theory model for the reconstructed field, but the model could not explain the discrepancy between the true and the reconstructed fields in the previous work. The main sources of the discrepancy were speculated to be a numerical artifact in the displacement estimator due to the discreteness of the sample. In this paper, we develop two new estimators of the displacement fields to reduce such numerical discreteness effect, the normalized momentum estimator~(NME) and the rescaled resumed estimator~(RRE). We show that the discrepancy Ref. [1] reported is not due to the numerical artifacts. We conclude that the method from Ref. [2] cannot fully reconstruct the shape of the nonlinear displacement field at the redshift we studied, while it is still an efficient BAO reconstruction method. In parallel, by properly accounting for the UV-sensitive term in a reconstruction procedure with an effective field theory approach, we improve the theoretical model for the reconstructed displacement field, by almost five times, from $\sim 15\%$ to the level of a few \% at $k\sim 0.2\ihMpc$ at the redshift $z=0.6$.